LinkedIn ads targeting options

This guide is built from LinkedIn's Marketing Solutions Help, starting with Targeting options for LinkedIn Ads and the pages linked in each section below. It covers the targeting you set on an ad set in Campaign Manager. If you are new to LinkedIn ads, start with our LinkedIn ads for B2B guide; uploaded lists and retargeting have their own page in LinkedIn Matched Audiences, and the reach settings in Audience Expansion and the Audience Network.

Build your own audience or use Auto-Targeting

Every ad set needs an audience, and Campaign Manager offers two ways to make one. LinkedIn's build your own audience page walks through the manual route: you can start from a saved audience, a LinkedIn template or a Matched Audience, then set location and profile language under Where is your target audience? and refine under Who is your target audience? with audience segments and audience attributes. The same screen holds the Enable Audience Expansion checkbox and a Save audience button so you can reuse the criteria on other ad sets.

Auto-Targeting instead "combines LinkedIn's professional audience, platform signals, and your inputs to automatically build an audience for your ad set." To use it you add your company's URL in the What you're marketing section and click Use Auto-Targeting in the Audience section. You can still edit profile language and locations, add exclusions (locations, uploaded contact or company lists, company industries, job seniorities, job functions and your own employees) and add signals such as a data source or a job title. LinkedIn's targeting best practices list what it uses: your product name and AI-generated insights from the source URL, your targeting settings, any optional signals, and LinkedIn advertising data combined with your account's past ad sets. The same page notes that "if you create an Auto-Targeting audience, not all targeting facets are available."

Location and profile language

These two are required on every ad set. For location you pick one of three types:

• Permanent location: the long-term location on the member's profile.
• Recent location: the member's IP address, for short-term visits. LinkedIn's example is that someone who recently visited San Francisco is included in the city, the county, the Bay Area, California, the United States, the NAMER cluster and North America.
• Recent or permanent location: either signal.

The estimated audience changes when you switch type. LinkedIn says recent-location estimates rely on IP signals "available for a more limited set of member accounts", so that audience is usually smaller, and it recommends permanent or recent-or-permanent for the broadest reach. Some countries are on a prohibited list and can't be selected, and LinkedIn warns that third-party tools such as Google Analytics may report location differently. You can also exclude locations, for example a country minus one city.

For profile language you choose one of 35 languages, one per ad set. Choosing English targets every member in your locations whatever their profile language, except in Sponsored Messaging. Any other language shows the ad only to members who match it. LinkedIn recommends writing the ad copy in the language you pick, and once you select a language and add an ad, it can't be changed.

Company attributes

Company targeting works through LinkedIn Pages: a member is mapped to the Page of the employer they list. When they type the company name as free text instead of picking it, LinkedIn maps them with a deep learning model, and if they list no company it "may derive their current company based on their public IP address at ad serving time." Showcase Pages can't be used for attribute targeting. The main company facets:

Attribute	What LinkedIn says it targets
Company Name	The employer the member lists; current, past, or current or past. Up to 200 companies per attribute.
Company Industry	The company's primary industry as stated by the company, with additional industries possibly inferred. Industries are hierarchical, so a parent industry includes all those below it.
Company Size	The size the Page admin entered or, if none, the number of members associated with the Page.
Company Followers	Followers of your own LinkedIn Page, which must be associated with the ad account.
Company Connections	1st-degree connections of employees at companies you select, only for companies with more than 500 employees.
Business type, revenue, growth rate, funding stage, category, regions served	Public, private, nonprofit or government; estimated annual revenue; year-over-year growth; funding stage; lists such as Fortune lists; regions where the employer has a business presence.

For more than 200 companies, LinkedIn points to a company list upload in Matched Audiences, which takes up to 300,000 companies. Our company and contact lists section covers the file format and match rates.

Job experience: title, function, seniority, skills

• Job Title: mainly what members enter. A typed title is classified by rules and a model trained on LinkedIn profile data; no third-party data is used. You can target current, past, or current or past holders of a title.
• Job Function and Job Seniority: titles are mapped to functions and seniority levels with LinkedIn's own taxonomy, and LinkedIn says "no AI modeling or inference is used" for either mapping.
• Member Skills: skills members add, skills mentioned in their profile text, and skills derived from their job description, employer, industry or education.
• Years of Experience: calculated from the dates of each listed position, excluding gaps and without double-counting overlaps.

LinkedIn's best practices suggest pairing Job Functions with Job Seniorities to reach decision-makers, for example the Information Technology, Engineering and Operations functions with Senior, Manager, Director, VP, CXO and Owner. They warn against targeting only a few job titles, since Campaign Manager suggests related titles as you type and adding current and past holders widens reach. Skills are offered as the alternative when a need cuts across many titles; LinkedIn's example is project management software, used by people in many roles.

Education, demographics, devices, interests and traits

• Education: degrees, fields of study and member schools. LinkedIn notes that schools and degrees are optional profile fields, so they can shrink the audience, and that universities often have separate Pages for each school that you need to add.
• Demographics: Member Age is "an estimation of age based on profile information" and you can't select a range that includes under-18s; Member Gender is inferred from profile information.
• Devices: device OS (such as iOS or Android) and device type (mobile, desktop or tablet) at the time of the impression.

The Interests and Traits group has three parts:

• Member Groups: the LinkedIn Groups a member belongs to, with no inferred data. Groups can't be used to exclude people, and since May 15, 2024 they are not available for the EEA or Switzerland.
• Member Interests: general, product and service interest topics based on what members engage with on LinkedIn. LinkedIn's example: the Business and Management interest reaches people who engaged with that content, "not necessarily people who work in those fields." It describes interests as most effective for awareness and consideration objectives.
• Member Traits: for example frequent contributors, frequent travellers, job seekers or the recently promoted.

One limit to plan around: interests and traits "may not be used with a contact list (whether uploaded directly or through a marketing platform) or a website retargeting audience." LinkedIn also bars targeting sensitive categories or discriminating on protected characteristics, and says a flagged ad will be taken down.

How AND, OR and Exclude combine

LinkedIn's audience size best practices explain how selections add up:

What you do	Effect on the audience
Several values in one facet (for example several job titles)	Larger: a member needs to match any one of them.
Add a facet under Narrow audience further	Smaller: a member must match one value from each facet.
Exclude a facet	Smaller: members who meet the excluded criteria are removed.
Several Matched Audiences of the same type (for example two website audiences)	Larger.
Matched Audiences of different types (for example a website and a company audience)	Smaller: members must match both.

The AND-OR targeting page shows how to switch a group of selections from AND to OR, using the example of the job title software engineer OR the skill software engineer, AND five or more years of experience. View audience summary shows the logic you built. Each attribute also has a selection cap for inclusions and exclusions: 200 for locations and company names, one profile language per ad set, one Company Followers Page per ad account and 100 for other company and professional attributes.

Audience size and the Audience Too Narrow message

The forecasted results panel shows the estimated audience as you build. LinkedIn's numbers:

• 300 member accounts is the minimum to run an ad set; below it, an Audience Too Narrow message stops you saving the targeting.
• LinkedIn suggests at least 50,000 to drive results, at least 300,000 for Sponsored Content and Sponsored Messaging, and 60,000 to 400,000 for text ads, adding that "there's no one-size-fits-all recommendation which is why testing is crucial."
• Its advice is to start with broader targeting and narrow down later using professional demographic reporting, which shows anonymised data on who engages with your ads.

Turning on Audience Expansion is one way to widen an ad set; our Audience Expansion guide covers when it is on by default and how to switch it off.

Targeting in the EEA and Switzerland

Reach is more limited for audiences in the European Economic Area and Switzerland. LinkedIn names location, member age, member gender, interests and traits, and Matched Audiences, which only include members who opted in through the consent screen or their ad settings. Member Groups are not available there at all. Its recommendations: add job seniorities, years of experience or job titles in place of age, consider predictive audiences instead of small retargeting audiences, lengthen the lookback window on website retargeting, and consider the LinkedIn Audience Network.

When LinkedIn changes the targeting options

LinkedIn's targeting updates page says it revises locations, industries, skills and languages from time to time. After an update, estimated audience sizes, pacing and demographic reports can shift, and options can be renamed, retired or replaced. Updates apply to active ad sets automatically, and a retired location is swapped for the closest available one, which "may be a broader area than your original selection." If an audience changes size without any edit on your side, LinkedIn suggests checking the ad set's targeting and the forecast before changing the budget.

How we set LinkedIn targeting

This part is our own practice, not LinkedIn guidance:

• We write the ideal customer profile first (industries, company sizes, the roles that buy) and only then translate it into facets, so the targeting follows the brief rather than whatever Campaign Manager suggests.
• We usually prefer function plus seniority over long job title lists, and keep a separate ad set for a title or skills audience so the two can be compared in the demographic report.
• We exclude current customers, competitors and our client's own employees where they would waste spend.
• We check the forecast against LinkedIn's suggested sizes before launch and treat a niche audience below them as a reason for a longer test or a different format, not for stacking more facets.

If you want help planning or running LinkedIn campaigns, see our services.

Frequently asked questions

What targeting options do LinkedIn ads offer?

Location and profile language (both required), company attributes such as name, industry and size, job title, function, seniority, skills and years of experience, education, age and gender, devices, member interests, traits and groups, plus Matched Audiences and predictive audiences.

What is the minimum audience size for LinkedIn ads?

An ad set needs at least 300 member accounts to run. LinkedIn suggests at least 50,000 to drive results and at least 300,000 for Sponsored Content and Sponsored Messaging.

Do several job titles narrow or widen a LinkedIn audience?

They widen it. Values within one facet work as OR, so a member needs to match any one. Adding a second facet under Narrow audience further works as AND and shrinks the audience.

Can I exclude people from LinkedIn ad targeting?

Yes. You can exclude locations, attributes and Matched Audiences such as uploaded lists, and Auto-Targeting lets you exclude your own employees. Member Groups can't be used to exclude people.

Can I combine interests with a contact list on LinkedIn?

No. LinkedIn says Member Interests and Traits may not be used with a contact list or a website retargeting audience in the same ad set.

For more on LinkedIn advertising, see our guides to LinkedIn ad objectives, LinkedIn ads bidding, Matched Audiences and Audience Expansion.